Quotes About Creativity

Impossible. An old elf swearword.

The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.

I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves. It is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen.

There was an old musician's cliché, about how there were no wrong notes on a piano.

Start fires. But only metaphorically. Unless you are cold and it's a safe setting. In which case: start fires.

Reading isn't important because it helps to get you a job. It's important because it gives you room to exist beyond the reality you're given. It is how humans merge.

The price of imagination is pain.

Don't do the work people expect you to do. Do the work you want to do. You only get one life. It's always best to live it as yourself.

Every book written is the product of a human mind in a particular state.

That was the price of human civilization—to create it, they had to close the door on their true selves. And so they are lost, that is how I understand it. And that is why they invented art: books, music, films, plays, painting, sculpture. They invented them as bridges back to themselves, back to who they are.

The object of art is to give life a shape

Willie Nelson once said that sometimes, you have to either write a song or you kick your foot through a window. The third option , I suppose , is that you write a book.

Don't be proud of only liking realism. It is like being proud of not having an imagination.

Humans, as a rule, don't like mad people unless they are good at painting, and only then once they are dead.

That is why I write. I am just for ever running from madness.

In a world that can get too much, a world where we are running out of mind space, fictional worlds are essential. They can be an escape from reality, yes, but not an escape from truth.

You are not the most intelligent creature in the universe. You are not even the most intelligent creature on your planet. The tonal language in the song of a humpback whale displays more complexity than the entire works of Shakespeare. It is not a competition. Well, it is. But don't worry about it.

Everyone knew that the way to make something even lovelier was to put it in a pie.

The problem lying behind the lack of human fulfillment was a shortage not just of time but of imagination. They found a day that worked for them and then stuck to it and repeated it, at least between Monday and Friday. Even if it didn't work for them—as was usually the case—they stuck to it anyway. Then they'd alter things a bit and do something a little bit more fun on Saturday and Sunday.

Don't do the work people expect you to do. Do the work you want to do. You only get one life. It's always best to live it as yourself.

The very reason such music exists is because it is a language that couldn't be communicated in any other way. But all I can say is that I felt suddenly

when you write with a pen it is like writing with a part of yourself like it is another finger.

Each of us has the power to enter a new world. All we have to do is change our mind.

Kurt Vonnegut was right. "Reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.